Villa Verde Housing by ELEMENTAL
B.
From the architect. Arauco is a forestry company that called us in 2009 to develop a plan to support their workers in the process to have access to their definitive house. We were asked to develop a set of typologies within the current housing policy for Fondo Solidario de Vivienda I (FSV I, units up to 600 UF or US$25,000 without debt) and for FSV II (units up to 1,000 UF or US$40,000 with a bank loan). These designs would be a contribution of the company to their workers, a kind of subvention, so that housing committees could use them when applying for the regular system of public funds. The importance of this project is that on the one hand, for the first time, it allowed us to think about a design for the upper niche of the housing policy. If we developed an innovative and competitive typology, we would broaden our possible contribution to social housing. We could have taken one of our own more economic typologies and used the extra money to finish them, filling the void that families were expected to complete. But we thought of once again applying the principle of incremental construction and prioritization of the more complex components, this time with higher standards both for the initial and the final scenario.
Again we are with the one of the Alejandro Aravena's team Elemental's social housing project. The negative thing is (according to picture) the project is very weak according to urban scale and the relations between house blocks is questionable. As a first sight, the project has lack of green spaces and coordination in urban scale. It reminds the typical modernist housing projects according to urban scale.
In other hand, considering the affordability and potential of the units are promising.It is good to see people who is trying to figure out a reasonable solutions for people in needs.








